By Justin Podur, Z Net

ISLAMABAD – The Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan (RAWA) is a women’s organization that runs underground schools and other projects, educates Afghan girls, runs a periodic journal, and agitates politically for women’s rights, human rights, secularism, and social justice in Afghanistan. From the 1979 Soviet invasion through to the 2006 closings of the camps, millions of Afghan refugees lived in Pakistan and many still do. While RAWA’s operations were always based primarily in Afghanistan, they have also had a strong presence in the Pakistan refugee community. I spoke to Mariam from RAWA in Islamabad when I was there in July 2008.

JUSTIN PODUR (JP): To begin, perhaps you could introduce readers to RAWA and its work in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

What's Going on in Afghanistan: An Interview with Sonali Kolhatkar
By Mike Whitney, CounterPunch, July 31, 2008.

Sonali Kolhatkar is the co-author, with James Ingalls, of Bleeding Afghanistan: Washington, Warlords, and the Propaganda of Silence (Seven Stories 2006). She is also the Co-Director of Afghan Women's Mission, a US-based non-profit organization that works in solidarity with the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan (RAWA).

Mike Whitney: On a recent stopover in France, Barack Obama said, "We must win in Afghanistan. There is no other option." Recent polls, however, show that public support for the war in Afghanistan has fallen off sharply. In fact, many American's don't even know why we are still there. Is there a big difference between what "winning" means to the Bush administration and what it means to the people of Afghanistan? Also, have you seen any indication that the Bush administration intends to keep its promises and establish security, rebuild the country's infrastructure, spread democracy, remove the warlords, liberate women, and "modernize" Afghanistan or was that all just a public relations smokescreen to promote the invasion?

The U.S. Treats Afghans Like Roaches
by Glenn Ford, Black Agenda Radio commentary, July 23, 2008.

To be occupied by foreign soldiers is always a degradation, but some countries are singularly unsuited to lord it over other nations. The United States seems incapable of conforming to the most elemental standards of civilized behavior when occupying Muslim lands. Americans routinely commit horrific atrocities against populations they are legally obligated to protect from harm. Since the beginning of the U.S. occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan, wedding parties have been especially attractive targets of U.S. airpower. "The crimes - mass murder from the air - point up the casually racist nature" of U.S. rule over non-European "others."

Adam Hanieh, The Bullet, Socialist Project

Neoliberalism, the 'New Middle East' and Palestine
In the late 1960s, with the definitive collapse of British and French colonialism in the Middle East, the US rose to become the dominant imperial power within the region. Because of the presence of oil, the Middle East became critically important to the overall construction of US hegemony in the global order. Control of the region's resources functioned simultaneously to secure a vital commodity, provide a source of profits, and as a cudgel with which to influence rival powers within the global marketplace. In the last 30 years, the region – particularly the states of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) – has taken on an increasingly important role as a source of flows of surplus capital – and hence overall power – within the global financial order.

Part 1, Adam Hanieh, the Bullet, Socialist Project.

Over the last six months, the Palestinian economy has been radically transformed under a new plan drawn up by the Palestinian Authority (PA) called the Palestinian Reform and Development Plan (PRDP). Developed in close collaboration with institutions such as the World Bank and the British Department for International Development (DFID), the PRDP is currently being implemented in the West Bank where the Abu Mazen-led PA has effective control. It embraces the fundamental precepts of neoliberalism: a private sector-driven economic strategy in which the aim is to attract foreign investment and reduce public spending to a minimum.

Afghanistan under the knife and hammer
by Richard Seymour, from Lenin's Tomb, July 3, 2008.

The procedure is quite simple. Choose a country in the world that seems to be suffering, in some way dysfunctional, ripe for 'intervention'. Perform some 'surgical' air strikes and, after a quick and painless stitch-up, auction it off to the highest bidders. Having done that, so the theory goes, you can return home and contemplate your good deeds. But, sticking with the medical metaphor for a second, you are not a doctor and you wouldn't know the hippocratic oath if it was printed in reverse lettering on your forehead. Whatever 'illness' you were supposedly dealing with has metastasized while the body is resisting your implants. In fact, the 'patient' keeps trying to kick your ass every time you come near him. Time to give up? Hell no. While Bush sends more troops to Afghanistan, Gordon Brown has insisted that there will be no 'artificial timetable' for British troop withdrawal from Afghanistan. Okay, but how about a real timetable?

By Priyamvada Gopal, Z Net, June, 29 2008
[This is a longer version of a piece carried by the Guardian June 27th.]

Over forty years ago, as Africa commenced the long and arduous process of decolonization, one of its foremost liberationist thinkers issued a prophetic warning. Frantz Fanon, himself a freedom fighter, wrote that the national leader in the postcolonial era should not ‘fall back into the past and become drunk on the remembrance of the epoch leading up to independence.' His powerful descriptions of a once effective leader who gradually secedes from reality and betrays the people who entrust him with their future has resonances for the tragic situation in which Zimbabwe finds itself today. Having reduced a once significant anti-colonialism to a self-serving dogma, Robert Mugabe is the kind of fallen leader Fanon cautioned Africa against. Hesitant African leaders who are being called upon to intervene might want to reread his classic essay, ‘The Pitfalls of National Consciousness' from that classic liberationist text, The Wretched of the Earth.

On a quest for secular piety: Reviewing Tarek Fatah's Chasing a Mirage
by Justin Podur, ZNet, June 22, 2008.

Tarek personally asked me to review his book, Chasing a Mirage: the tragic illusion of an Islamic State (CM). With a book being favorably reviewed in the Canadian (and US and UK) media, including the Globe and Mail, the Toronto Star, the Huffington Post, the UK Guardian, and the Asper-family owned newspapers (Ottawa Citizen and National Post, which also published long excerpts of CM and frequently runs op-eds by Tarek), CM hardly needed a review from me to get attention. I therefore took the request as a signal of a serious desire to engage with people who might disagree about the ideas of the book.

CM's basic thesis is that religion and politics should be separated in Islam. Although it has major flaws, it also has many attributes of interest and will be thought-provoking on the relationship between religion and politics, and between Islam and the West.

A flawed book with some thought-provoking ideas

A Review of Peter Hallward's 'Damming the Flood'

By Justin Podur, June 14, 2008, Z NET
Review of: Peter Hallward, Damming the Flood: Haiti, Aristide, and the Politics of Containment. Verso 2007.

Haiti has never had a period without interference in its sovereignty. Indeed Haiti's history could be seen as one long, heroic struggle against such interference: first to overthrow the slavers and colonizers of France (and the rest of Europe), and then to fight for sovereignty against the US, which viewed Haiti as part of its domain, to dispose of according to its own whims.

Canada-Colombia FTA: When Democracy Gets in the Way, Just Sign It, eh?
By: Michèal Ó Tuathail
http://canadacolombiaproject.blogspot.com/2008/06/canada-colombia-fta-when-democracy-gets.html

On June 7 2008, less than one year after Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper announced the beginning of bilateral free trade talks with Colombia, the Canadian Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade announced the conclusion of negotiations.

While the US-Colombia free trade agreement has been stalled in the US, due mainly to the grave human rights situation in Colombia and, some say, a US election campaign, Canada has offered transnational capital an opening through the back door.

Canada-style, eh?

"The Government of Canada is delivering on its commitment to open up opportunities for Canadian business in the Americas and around the world," stated the Minister of Foreign Affairs and International Trade David Emerson, revealing the true beneficiaries of this agreement. Emerson went on to note that "the free trade agreement will expand Canada-Colombia trade and investment, and will help solidify ongoing efforts by the Government of Colombia to create a more prosperous, equitable and secure democracy."